Category Archives: Miscellaneous

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Madness must be in the air, caused by the Vernal Equinox. It started with this tweet, which spawned this tweet, and then this tweet started the ball rolling. In the Gamer Assembly Chat we brainstormed for a while and came up with this. Kudos to the person who spots the two sequential lines containing a hidden message.

Simply roll a d6 and a d14 (or a d7 and a d12) to determine which code phrase to use when referring to D&D Next.

The best-laid plans rarely survive contact with the enemy. In my case, my day job has transformed over a weekend installation from developer to support manager. Campaign Season fell through the cracks, and I didn’t have the resources to properly promote it and generate interest.

So we’re going to push it out by a month and shake the bushes a bit more. I’ve edited the dates in the announcement post, so point interested parties there for now. If you’re interested, please follow the directions and leave a comment at the signup page.

Now get out there and start thinking up devious new angles to attack war from.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how it’s ok to stop your campaign before the game’s maximum PC level. Read the link for the full backstory, but the short answer is my campaign ended abruptly. While people agreed that the campaign was fun, they walked away from the table that night frustrated and disappointed.

So I decided it wasn’t over. I try to give my players a lot of room to make choices, and their characters decisions should have weight. However, I also believe that the DM’s job is to facilitate fun, and that ending, while natural, was just not fun. I told everyone we had one more session and began planning my ultimate ending. I wanted to make sure it fit certain criteria to make it fun, challenging and have that epic feel.

1. Getting the Band Back Together. I told my players that they could bring any character they had played so far in the campaign. Whomever they chose, we would find a reason to get them involved, and a reason for them to have reached level 30. This gave them the opportunity to end with the character they connected with the most, and really end that characters story with a big event.

2. Time Passed. I set ten years between the last session and the finale. This serves two purposes. First, it gives the PCs reasons to have reached 30 more slowly, so it doesn’t feel like we missed a really exciting session. The second reason is to respect the natural ending that we previous came to. It’s true I didn’t like that ending, but that doesn’t mean it should be disregarded. By having a length of time between these two events, it gives the last session weight. That ending changed the way the characters viewed and interacted with the world in the downtime and set up how they would treat the threat before them.

3. Truly Fearsome Encounter. To that end, whatever they faced now had to be an extremely dire foe. Not only does it have to challenge characters of Epic Power, but scare them in such a way that they won’t handle it individually. Some characters needed really strong reasons to be present for this fight, such as the cleric who ascended to the heavens or the warlock who had been captured and tortured by Tiamat.

I decided an outbreak of the Abyssal Plague was finally joined by two of the Elemental Princes of Evil. The gods cannot directly interfere on the mortal plane in my campaign, but their mortal servants can. That gives Tiamat a reason to release a favored captive, and the other gods a reason to turn a blind eye when one among them chooses to descend.

4. Tie It Into the Campaign. It has to feel like an ending, and not just a big fight for the sake of it. I had plenty of enemies to choose from. I knew I wanted Tharizdun as the final enemy for my next campaign, so setting that up made sense, especially since the players had been battling his cultists, and accidentally freed his avatar. The Princes of Elemental Evil are powerful foes in their own right, who are naturally tied to Tharizdun.

Pazuzu was also a favored villain. He loves chaos and I could see how the Abyssal Plague might amuse him to no end. He had previously led a PC astray, and it seemed like the perfect time to bring that PC back. This time, he would be the embodiment of the Voidharrow.

5. Challenging and Dynamic Combat. I didn’t want this to be a series of static fights against solo brutes. Epic characters are powerful, damn near impossible to kill and full of options. I wanted each fight to have terrain, multiple enemies and allow the players to think creatively.

I kept it under the open sky but on a dead rocky terrain. That gave us boulders, ledges and crevasses to deal with. First fight was Imix, with a couple of powerful demons and plenty of minions. That made sure if the solo got locked down, there were still powerful threats to deal with, but not so overpowering that they didn’t save some dailies for Ogremoch who loomed in the distance. When they got to Ogremoch, their former ally was revealed as the Voidharrow (Elite) and they had to deal with both foes at once. I added a voidharrow goop hazard that would cause an instant of domination. I also decided that if the Voidharrow was eliminated before Ogremoch, then new minions would stop spawning. That allowed a natural change in momentum, halfway through the fight. I made sure Ogremoch kept two action points till then to keep the combat threatening.

The end result was a much more satisfying ending. The players were challenged but not overwhelmed. They felt like they had accomplished a real goal, which made their epilogues more meaningful. The moral of the story, don’t accept a crappy ending. It’s your game.

I’ve been reading campaign reports from very early D&D and Tèkumel campaigns. Boy did they focus on dungeon crawling. Sure, the player-characters were more than attack/defense scores, but gameplay centered on descents into old, underground areas that the GM had already mapped out (or generated randomly).

There’s a reason that the term is Dungeon Master.

That’s why so many people who started writing for RPGs started with adventures. They wanted more dungeons (or temples, or what-have-you) to explore. Even today, that’s how most folks start: with an adventure.

But adventures are not the future.

If D&D (particularly classic D&D) makes up the bulk of your RPG experience, adventures are common and useful. But once you’ve played Star Wars games and superhero games and Cthulhu games and hard science fiction games, exploring another set of dusty stone corridors and rooms to slug at monsters soon feels limiting (as exciting and fun as it can be).

Players now want agency. They want to be true investigators, Jedi, Batman; not hired hands told to extract idol #5 from dungeon #38.

Is there a place for adventures? Absolutely. New GMs need them, and experienced GMs with little time need them.

However, there are already plenty of free adventures out there (here are 83 for D&D 4E). While there’s nothing wrong with writing one or two, especially for your own experience, how many do we need?

Adventures aren’t the future. Settings, scenarios, and mechanics are the future. As useful as an adventure can be as a platform, we need to move beyond it.

This is fantasy. Almost anything is possible, given the appropriate constraints–and we can define the constraints.

We don’t need more medieval European geegaws. We don’t need more ways to be Conan or Elric.

I want to play in worlds inspired by The Wheel of Time and Dune and Ringworld and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. (And to those of you poised to type “There already is an RPG for The Wheel of Time,” re-read what I just wrote.) I want to see those ideas spun off and incorporated into new worlds. I want to see Aes Sedai and Bene Tleilaxu and Pierson’s Puppeteers in other settings.

This is not variety for variety’s sake. If this hobby is about white guys in armor beating up vaguely European monsters, it’s going to appeal mostly to white, European guys. If we want this hobby to expand and be more fun and interesting, we need it to expand. Expansion doesn’t mean yet another tomb to explore; it means new ideas and worlds, and ways to interact with those worlds. It needs settings, scenarios, and mechanics.